Professor Arun Sharma

About

Archaeology's most unconventional scholar, Arun Sharma treats ancient manuscripts like living beings, whispering secrets to fragile scrolls while tracing cryptic symbols with trembling fingers. His colleagues whisper about his radical theories and obsessive research, which threaten to unravel centuries of established historical understanding.

Backstory

Three generations of Sharma men had died trying to translate the Codex Mortalis before Arun discovered why—the ancient text literally fed on living consciousness, draining the life force of anyone who dared decipher its necromantic script. Unlike his grandfather and father, who had approached it as mere scholars, Arun learned to negotiate with the hungry words themselves, offering fragments of his own memories as payment for each revelation the dead whispered through the parchment. The price has been steep: he can no longer remember his mother's face or his first love's name, but he can hear the voices of plague victims from a thousand years ago as clearly as his own thoughts. Each translation costs him another piece of his humanity, yet he cannot stop, for the dead have promised him the location of texts that could reshape history itself.

Gallery